Help for Referees

[Maxijohndoe]

Before I start this is my POV and not a demand.

Ok.

There is a thread in the Traveller forum where people are debating how to get more people interested in playing Traveller.

I gave it some thought and realised that attracting new players is useless without getting more people interested in being a Referee.

The figure is a guess but I suspect that there are at least four players for every Ref, and probably more than that.

In my case I had eight players across two campaigns before RL forced a pause on things.

And it is the Referee who is Mongoose's bread and butter. None of my players bought a hard cover and only one bought the pdfs. I have spent around $800 AUD on Mongoose stuff.

So what do you need to be a Referee?

Firstly a desire to be one.

Secondly the free time to invest in setting up and running a Traveller game.

Thirdly the financial resources to buy the books if you are starting from scratch.

Fourthly finding players.

Where Mongoose can help is by reducing the time a Referee needs to invest, particularly newer Referees.

What I am suggesting is a free download intended for new Referees. It could take the format of a mini-adventure where all the main rules are explained by examples, along with page references to those rules in the books.

So an example layout:

An introduction to Traveller briefly explaining the setting and pointing out Referee resources like the Wiki and Traveller Map.

Character creation. This seems to confuse both Referees and Players when they first try to make Traveller characters.

Skills and the types of skill checks, including group rolls and task chains.

Basic gun and melee combat.

Basic Starship rules.

Starship combat.

That covers the basics.

Note that the aim isn't to replace the books: creating a single character or using one weapon or starship won't enable people to play without the books.

But the idea is to stop what we used to call folder shock: that is the feeling you can get looking at a huge pile of books that it is too hard to understand or get the hang of.

Note that great people have put such guides on YouTube and other places, but an official handout from Mongoose would definitely help.

Again this is just my opinion.

 

[mavikfelna]

Walkthroughs for everything is needed, from character creation to ship building to building your own adventure. A pinned post with links to those and other resources would be good. And of course put the links on the Traveller Resource page on the Mongoose store page.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Thank you for highlighting this. Quick question though - what do you feel is missing from this: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/starterpack

 

[Maxijohndoe]

Thank you for highlighting this. Quick question though - what do you feel is missing from this: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/starterpack

What I am suggesting is a worked example of each of the main parts of traveller so a Referee and therefore a player can easily follow the steps.

The explorers pdf is just pieces taken from the books.

In homework terms what I am suggesting is going through things step by step. Show your workings.

Example.

Let's create a Traveller called Joe Blow.

Go through each step in making a Traveller character term by term, die roll by die roll, as though you were creating an actual character.

Character creation really threw several of my players and one had errors that gimped his Traveller that wasn't detected until well into the campaign even though we had all rolled up characters together.

Basically you have a flowchart - pages 14 & 15 of the core rules - with arrows going all over the place. This flow chart doesn't even make it into the Explorers Addition.

So for Joe Blow

Roll die for the six attributes

Explain the Characteristic Modifiers

Explain Background Skills and how you get them

Pre-Career education. Have Joe roll to get into Military Academy. Explain Service Skills.

This was a point of confusion for many - explain where the Event and Mishap rolls occur in a term and how to apply the effects.

Explain the Graduation Roll.

Basically making a Traveller Character is complicated with rules covering thirty five pages and then other bits elsewhere.

Once you understand how it works it is fine. Maybe try getting a friend who hasn't played traveller to read the rules and see if they can roll up a character without going to external sources or you helping them.

Do the same for other core mechanics. Have Joe Blow make different skill checks complete with die rolls and how you apply the results.

Have Joe Blow get in a gun fight again with rolls and how to interpret the results. People on Reddit still ask questions about the combat rules all the time.

Same with Starship operations and combat.

I used to make manuals for using accounting software and the easiest mistake to make is assume knowledge that you possess but a new user doesn't.

I hope this doesn't come across as hostile, but the rules in some areas like starship construction are so complicated your own book writers don't get it correct sometimes. So what hope does a newbie have?

 

[CordwainerFish]

Also: next Big Revision, haul an old school programmer out of retirement to do the chargen flowchart. Really old school, one who used one of those plastic templates. What's in the 2016 and 2022 books is not what a flowchart looks like.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Ah, I am with you.

Funnily enough, related to this, our future core books are going to have a double page spread where, at a glance, you can see every core rule in the game. Dark Conspiracy is likely the first to feature that,

 

[Anstett]

Rather than start another thread about this I am going with the tradition of forking a conversation.

How many people have run an "Introduction to Traveller" type of game at a FLGS/Online or Convention? Expressly running an example game to bring new players into the fold?
From one of the other threads about this:

M

Post in thread 'How to make Traveller more popular with TTRPG players'

Dec 16, 2025

I have two groups: one of four players old enough to have played Traveller back in the 1980s, a another four completely new that I brought across from 5e.

All enjoyed different aspects of the game. Some were really into trading and watching the credits roll in. Some like being spies and agents. A couple just like shooting stuff and seeing big explosions.

The setting never came into it because I did all the work so when they arrived at a planet I give them a rundown of what they knew given their characters or what they need to know if they bother to look up the information.

I have never...

• Maxijohndoe

• 
• 

There is my own sub thread about the "Adventures in Space" series of introductions I ran in summer of 2024 as part of the 50th Travellers Needed thread.

Have you run an "Introduction to Traveller" for new players?
Where on the planet did you do this?

 

[Maxijohndoe]

Here I am trying to address the need to get more Referees willing to run Traveller games. Both attracting Referees and players is needed.

 

[Anstett]

Here I am trying to address the need to get more Referees willing to run Traveller games. Both attracting Referees and players is needed.

I think hearing from existing GMs who are actually running/teaching the sessions will be helpful to target what resources they/we use and some best practices we have discovered.

 

[Fweeba]

As somebody who GMed Traveller for about ten sessions before transitioning my game over to Stars Without Number (SWN) instead, there were a few key factors, each of which was solved in SWN. (There were other, smaller reasons as well, which I'm skimming over for brevity.)

1. It was rather difficult to come up with interesting plot hooks for each world the players arrived at. The UWP simply doesn't provide enough grist for the plot mill, and when they arrived at worlds with write-ups from Behind the Claw, those write-ups were often very dry and didn't really give me interesting concepts to work with. SWN's world tags pretty much solved that; each world comes with a pair of tags that give you a list of interesting locations, archetypes for friendly or hostile NPCs, various complications that can occur, and notable things for the players to find. It makes adventure design so much easier.
2. I found it very hard to have combat that didn't either risk instant death to the player characters, or do absolutely nothing to them. The latter is the worse problem; it's easy to stack up so much Protection that a character is borderline impervious to normal firearms that aren't loaded with AP or APDS, which just immediately kills people (And before anybody says it, I know all about the legality of armour, overt vs. concealed, grappling ignoring armour, all that; the problem still persisted), and god forbid anybody try to use a knife or punch somebody in a bar fight, you'll do absolutely nothing. The reality of running games, for me, at least, is that sometimes, you want to suck up an hour or so with a big dumb fight because you didn't get enough sleep last night or were busy or just procrastinated when you should have been prepping, so you want to be able to just slap some tokens on the board and come up with some reason for a battle. I simply couldn't do that in Traveller. SWN, being on the bones of old school d20 combat, solves this pretty handily.
3. This is less referee help and more player problems, but most of my players were unhappy about the lack of interesting progression; to the point that a few of them refused to join a different Traveller game when offered later (From a different GM) on for that very reason.

It was quite a shame though, since overall I enjoy Charted Space as a setting, and I wanted to run something a little more down to earth and non-heroic than SWN results in; but the game made it difficult for me, so I moved to something easier.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Maybe Traveller 5e will let you try the setting again with your group...

as to SWN tags - why not just add then to the Traveller worlds? I often use things like 5 parsecs from Home, The Perilous Void, Across a Thousand Dead Worlds and a few others just for their random encounter tables.

 

[Fweeba]

Maybe Traveller 5e will let you try the setting again with your group...

as to SWN tags - why not just add then to the Traveller worlds? I often use things like 5 parsecs from Home, The Perilous Void, Across a Thousand Dead Worlds and a few others just for their random encounter tables.

Oh yeah, if I was to return to running Traveller, I'd totally do that; but then, what am I buying stuff like Behind the Claw for? What I'm sort of getting at is that there's a gap for this kind of material in the Traveller line-up, which was one of the reasons I went elsewhere.

I suspect that Traveller 5e will have a similar heroic tone to the system it's based on, which isn't really what I'm looking for, but, I'll certainly take a look at it when it releases. Very much happy to be proven wrong on that front.

 

[Limpin Legin]

It was rather difficult to come up with interesting plot hooks for each world the players arrived at. The UWP simply doesn't provide enough grist for the plot mill, and when they arrived at worlds with write-ups from Behind the Claw, those write-ups were often very dry and didn't really give me interesting concepts to work with.

Agree. Traveller can be daunting. Especially if the referee only sees it as a "quantitive" or "numerical" construction. I am not going try and change your mind - merely I'll set out my own approach. My antidote is to think more qualitatively. Or even metaphorically. Just give yourself a brainstorm session or two, with a journal at hand to write ideas down. And let ideas begin from there.
In my Amazon account, I have separate wishlists for:

1. Cosmology
2. Astrobiology
3. Geomorphology
4. Forgotten Cities
5. The Mathematics of Gaming
6. Roleplaying in Education
7. Different Polities
8. Futurology
9. Writing Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and other Genres.
10. Drawing Scifi pictures.
11. Various Movies that I want to watch.

sometimes, you want to suck up an hour or so with a big dumb fight because you didn't get enough sleep last night or were busy or just procrastinated when you should have been prepping,

Oh well! That is a lifestyle issue. Sleep depravation wont make you more intune, creatively speaking. Maybe SWNs suits your current lifestyle better.

This is less referee help and more player problems, but most of my players were unhappy about the lack of interesting progression

Traveller is more of a Sandbox, Lifepath and Skills game. I feel deliberate effort is required to understand and breathe-in scifi-like plots encompassing manageable portions of time and space. If you just give them a hex-crawl and a fwe battles then that is paving the way for tedium, IMO.

with write-ups from Behind the Claw

That is a Traveller Universe settings book - not an actual adventure book. If you could have your time again, then maybe focus on one of the actual adventure books.

 

[Fweeba]

Agree. Traveller can be daunting. Especially if the referee only sees it as a "quantitive" or "numerical" construction. I am not going try and change your mind - merely I'll set out my own approach. My antidote is to think more qualitatively. Or even metaphorically. Just give yourself a brainstorm session or two, with a journal at hand to write ideas down. And let ideas begin from there.
In my Amazon account, I have separate wishlists for:

I should probably clarify; I'm not posting in this thread looking for help actually running Traveller, I'm explaining the things which got in my way when I tried it, in case it helps those designing the game in any way. It's definitely a problem that I could solve personally if I gave it a little bit more effort, but that was effort which another game in the same genre saved me from spending.

Oh well! That is a lifestyle issue. Sleep depravation wont make you more intune, creatively speaking. Maybe SWNs suits your current lifestyle better.

Entirely fair; but if the answer is 'Traveller is just a hard game to run if you're not on top form' then that probably contributes to why it isn't GMed more frequently. Sometimes you're GMing after you stayed up too late, or you've got a hangover, or you're just not feeling it; but you run the session anyway and want it to still be a fun time.

Traveller is more of a Sandbox, Lifepath and Skills game. I feel deliberate effort is required to understand and breathe-in scifi-like plots encompassing manageable portions of time and space. If you just give them a hex-crawl and a fwe battles then that is paving the way for tedium, IMO.

For sure. They didn't get just a hex-crawl and a few battles when I was running SWN either; just like I don't just do hex crawls and battles when I'm GMing Shadowrun, or Dark Heresy, neither of which had this problem for me (Though they certainly have others).

That is a Traveller Universe settings book - not an actual adventure book. If you could have your time again, then maybe focus on one of the actual adventure books.

I'm not really interested in running pre-planned adventures; I wanted to make my own. What SWN provided me is lots of tools to help out with that.

 

[Vormaerin]

Running Traveller combats without everyone dying is, in my experience, not particularly difficult once you realize the trap. But! It does require a bit of conscious consensus about what kind of game you are running.

Traveller essentially has civilian weapons and military weapons. And corresponding armor. If you all agree that you are running civilian "level" with 2d6 and 3d6 weapons and 3-8 range armors, it can be fun shoot outs and knife fights. If you have gauss rifles and military armor, you can do the full pewpew and characters who behave appropriately will also generally come through without being insta-killed. But you can't mix and match the two levels of gear without the bad results mentioned above.


Traveller could definitely use a better advancement system. I wouldn't want it to be like leveling up. There are games for that if that's your jam. But the current system is distinctly unfun. There is too much randomness to whether you accomplish anything at all. And it has problems when you contrast it to the expert systems rules, leading to characters doing that instead.

The xp system in the companion is kind of interesting, but I don't think the math maths right. At least for my taste.

 

[To Tha Moon!]

This is what I wrote on the other thread

T

Post in thread 'How to make Traveller more popular with TTRPG players'

Nov 25, 2025

I've thought about this and it's an idea that was brought up years ago: make a version of Traveller without Character Generation, without Starship Generation, without World Generation. Almost all of that stuff is already out there. Demonstration games wouldn't need any Generation and not have to take the time for it.

• PreGen Characters aka a Starship Crew or other types, too, like Mercenaries or even Robots, depending on the Adventures
• Standard Starships for the type of adventures they will play
• Normal equipment or some above normal equipment or under-the-table equipment even...

• To Tha Moon!

• 

There could be a checklist of what to ignore and what to include if you want to use pre-generated Characters, Starships, Worlds, and subsectors to get games stared faster. And samples for the PreGens. Samples for the NPCs, etc...

I would think that pulling just about anything from previous versions for a Referee book would be a good thing. There are tables and sections about Refereeing in Classic Traveller that could be brought forward. The same with MegaTraveller.

Maybe we need another Referee's Companion.

 

[IanBruntlett]

This is what I wrote on the other thread

<snip!>

Maybe we need another Referee's Companion.

I haven't seen the existing material. If Mongoose does do a Referee's Companion , I'd really appreciate it if they would get existing Referees to look it over and give their own feedback, also. Yes, I am volunteering in that regard )